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The I and the Others. Articulations of Personality and Communication Structures in the Lyric

The paper discusses articulations of personality and communication
structures in the lyric: who is speaking in a poem? What is the status of the person
who speaks, or the one who is spoken about? Is it the author himself who is
speaking, or is it someone else – an autonomous being, completely different and
detached from the subject developed in the text? Who is addressed in and by a
poem? It is made clear that conventional concepts of Stimmung (mood), Erlebnis
(experience), and lyrisches Ich (the ›lyric I‹) should be set aside and the nature of
lyric communication should be redetermined. For this purpose, a precise examination of the specific use of personal pronouns in poems is necessary, especially of the
pronouns ›I‹, ›you‹ and ›we‹. The indistinct ›lyric I‹ should be substituted by the term
›articulated I‹. The poetic text as a whole is being structured by a superordinate
entity, the Textsubjekt (›textual subject‹). Every speaking entity in a poem has a
counterpart being addressed by it. Analyzing communication structures in poetry
thus means first of all looking for an addressee who is constituted by the text. Only
in a second step should we figure out if the address refers to the intended reader.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:83414
Date07 February 2023
CreatorsBurdorf, Dieter
PublisherDe Gruyter
Source SetsHochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Relation1862-5290

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